Death Stranding 2 devs thought ‘Brutal’ mode was hard enough, but pushed the game to ‘the upper limit’ with its new difficulty option on PC
Death Stranding 2’s PC launch on Thursday may have been overshadowed just a bit by Crimson Desert, but as I wrote in my review, it’s a great game, whether you’re in it for the Hideo Kojima story or the delivery sim sandbox. Folks who especially love the latter, though, like PC Gamer’s Morgan Park, almost universally have the same complaint: it’s too easy. Though Death Stranding 2 lets you challenge yourself by making deliveries on foot, the vehicles, upgrades, and shared infrastructure from other players can trivialize making flawless deliveries.
For the PC release Kojima Productions added a new difficult option called “To the Wilder,” which was created specifically to address player feedback, the studio said in an interview with PC Gamer this week.
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Yoshiike said that the effect of Timefall, which gradually ages and destroys anything it touches, is “particularly pronounced” in To the Wilder, making resource management crucial—”almost a requirement.” He emphasized the need to plan out missions in advance and think about what tools will be best suited to the job and testing out combinations that may not have been important on lower difficulties.
When Yoshiike told me that the developers had played through To the Wilder from start to finish and that there were “some items that [they] absolutely needed to unlock,” I asked for an example. Sorry, fellow porters—Kojima Productions wants you to learn the hard way.
